OSLO — Three suspected al-Qaeda members were arrested Thursday in a Norwegian bomb plot linked to the same terrorist planners behind thwarted schemes to blow up New York's subway and a British shopping mall.

The alleged Norwegian plot, underscoring changing al-Qaeda tactics since the Sept. 11 attacks, was said to involve powerful peroxide bombs similar to ones aimed for detonation in New York and Manchester, England.

All three plans were organized by Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaeda's former chief of external operations, who had been in charge of plotting attacks worldwide, Norwegian and U.S. officials believe.

Al-Somali was killed in a CIA drone airstrike last year, but officials say the three plots had already been set in motion by the time of his death.

The arrests Thursday suggested how decentralized and nimble al-Qaeda has become since the Sept. 11 attacks. The terrorist group has recently focused on smaller-level attacks that don't require the intricate planning that it took to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings in New York and Washington.

Last year, when the FBI and CIA thwarted the suicide attack in the New York subway, officials called it the most dangerous plot since Sept. 11. And in the past two days, revelations about the related plots in England and now in Norway have illustrated the terrorism group's multi-country scope.

Al-Qaeda keeps its plots compartmentalized, and officials do not think the suspects in Norway knew about the other cells involved.

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The Norwegian and U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The officials said it was unclear whether the men in Norway had perfected the bomb-making recipe, but Janne Kristiansen, head of the country's Police Security Service, said, "According to our evaluation, the public has never been at risk."

The three captured men, whose names were not released, had been under surveillance for more than a year as the FBI and CIA worked with Norwegian authorities.

The U.S. also turned over financial data that terrorist financing experts had collected, said Stuart Levy, the Treasury Department's top counterterrorism official.

Two suspects were arrested in Norway. A third was captured in Germany, where he was vacationing, the Frankfurt general prosecutor's office said.

Norway's Police Security Service said the arrests made in Norway took place in the Oslo area. Kristiansen said all three men "had connections to Oslo."

Those arrested in Norway included a 39-year-old Norwegian of Uighur origin who has lived in the country since 1999 and a 31-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan who had a permanent Norwegian residency permit, Kristiansen said. The man arrested in Germany was a 37-year-old Iraqi with a Norwegian residency permit, he said.

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